Occasionally, you may find the need to encrypt information within a database. One of the standards for encryption is AES (Advanced Encryption Standard). In fact, in a lot of government institutions, AES is the required data encryption method.

At this point, I feel I need to make an important distinction. Encryption is a reversible method of masking data; not to be confused with hashing, which is supposed to be a one-way encoding method (though, many hash methods can be cracked through various types of attacks).

If you do need to encrypt your data, you have a few options when working with PHP and MySQL.

The first option is a pair of built-in MySQL functions. AES_ENCRYPT() and AES_DECRYPT() make it easy to encrypt and decrypt your data directly through a MySQL query. In order to use the AES_ENCRYPT() and AES_DECRYPT() functions, you will need to provide the data (original data should be provided to the encryption function, the encrypted data should be provided to the decryption function) as the first parameter and a 16-bit key as the second parameter. The same key will need to be used for both functions (otherwise, the decryption won’t work properly).